Between the Material You design and move to break apart the Chrome browser from ChromeOS, now more than ever, ChromeOS is Linux with Google's desktop environment.
literally, all Chrome OS / chromium OS needs to do for me to actually embrace it. is native out of box flatpack support
one issue I might see them having with flatpack, is the permissions right now are handled kind of stupidly IMO. but if those get solved I think flatpack would be a great addition to chromium os ecosystem
While this would definitely be useful and make linux software more accessible, I'm worried about something similar to Android's Google Play Services eventually happening where almost every piece of software, despite being for an open source operating system, depends on proprietary google software
Im not too worried myself, it's worth noting that I myself am perfectly fine using a fully foss android phone with the sole exception of discord, since even the webclient for that sucks. it is possible they could eventually go down that path, but as long as the option is there for foss I don't really mind too much
As long as you have a Crostini-capable ChromeOS device, you can run flatpacks. This is actually the preferred way to run Firefox (via the Linux Flatpack).
there is a noticeable perf penalty on devices I've tested, particularly around gpu (but that may change in the future) it's also just kinda a bit annoying for normal folk to use i've found
chromeOS provides a LOT. its very easy to use and quite reliable, and its super easy computer illiterate people to get into.
I have tried most distros, pretty much every single one that claims to be user friendly. not a single one holds a candle to chrome/chromiumOS.
for a lot of people chromeOS is genuinely a good experience that Linux simply cannot replicate. the polish is very much beyond what other distros provide.
Flatpak is still in the packager teething stage - it's going to be a couple/few years before all of the packaging and permission kinks are worked out. There's already progress, I'm spending a lot less time unfucking flatpak permissions with flatseal than I was in 2019.